Efficiently utilizing Information Technology (IT) resources (e.g., personnel) of a business enterprise is becoming increasingly difficult, as the organizational structure of enterprises and supporting network infrastructures become more complex. As used herein, a “network” is a group of two or more network elements interconnected by one or more segments of transmission media on which communications may be exchanged between the elements. Each segment may be any of a plurality of types of transmission media, including one or more electrical or optical wires or cables made of metal and/or optical fiber, air (e.g., using wireless transmission over carrier waves) or any combination of these transmission media. As used herein, “plurality” means two or more. It should be appreciated that a network may be as simple as two network elements connected by a single wire, bus, wireless connection or other type of segments. Further, it should be appreciated that when a network is illustrated in a drawing herein as being connected to an element in the drawing, the connected element itself is considered part of the network.
Business enterprises often have several business units such as, for example, finance, accounting, sales, human resources, research and development (R&D), customer support, etc., and each business unit may have its own server(s) on the enterprise's network. Each business unit also may have one or more proprietary applications (e.g., that run on it's own servers), including monitoring applications residing at different layers of the server architecture such as, for example, hardware, firmware, and software applications. Further, one or more of the business units may employ their own IT group (e.g., operations staff), where each group member has technical expertise with respect to the servers and/or applications of the business unit.
When problems arise with a business unit's application or server such as, for example, software errors and/or hardware errors or failures, the appropriate IT member needs to be notified so the problem can be addressed. Some enterprises still rely, at least in part, on manual notification of problems, where a user contacts one or more IT group members by telephone, e-mail, pager or otherwise. Obvious drawbacks to manual notification are the unreliability of users to learn of a problem and/or report it to the IT group, and the inherent delays and consumption of user resources in relying on users to do so.
For these reasons, many enterprises have turned to automated notification systems that automatically detect problems as “events” and notify IT members of these events. However, known automated notification systems typically do not account for the complexities of today's business enterprises and the networks that support them. For example, when a problem with a server or an application running on a server is discovered, known systems do not consider the business unit(s) responsible for the application or server when generating notifications. As a result, notifications are generated and sent to IT personnel irrespective of whether the IT personnel are responsible for supporting (or have expertise with respect to) the server or application. For example, in response to a sales group's SQL server crashing, a notification system may send notifications of the failure to IT personnel (e.g., members of the R&D, accounting and human resources IT groups) other than those employed by and/or responsible for the sales department (e.g., the sales department's IT group). These other IT personnel may disregard the notification (e.g., treat it as a sort of “spam”) or perhaps coordinate with the appropriate IT group members to respond to the notification. In either case, IT personnel time is wasted, such that the Enterprise's IT resources are inefficiently utilized.